Revolution

thumb|[[Eugène Delacroix's romantic painting, Liberty Leading the People (), is an example of a revolution in the political sense.]]

In political science, a revolution (, 'a turn around') is a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's class, state, ethnic, or religious structures. According to the sociologist Jack Goldstone, all revolutions contain "a common set of elements at their core: (a) efforts to change the political regime that draw on a competing vision (or visions) of a just order, (b) a notable degree of informal or formal mass mobilization, and (c) efforts to force change through noninstitutionalized actions such as mass demonstrations, protests, strikes, or violence."

Revolutions have occurred throughout human history and varied in their methods, durations and outcomes. Some revolutions started with peasant uprisings or guerrilla warfare on the periphery of a country; others started with urban insurrection aimed at seizing the country's capital city. A regime may become vulnerable to revolution due to a recent military defeat, or economic chaos, or an affront to national pride and identity, or persistent repression and corruption. Autocracies that take power during revolutions tend to be exceptionally durable and long-lasting.

Notable revolutions in recent centuries include the American Revolution (1765–1783), French Revolution (1789–1799), Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), Spanish American wars of independence (1808–1826), Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), Xinhai Revolution in China in 1911, Revolutions of 1917–1923 in Europe (including the Russian Revolution and German Revolution), Chinese Communist Revolution (1927–1949), Indian independence movement (1885-1947), decolonization of Africa (mid-1950s to 1975), Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Cuban Revolution in 1959, Iranian Revolution and Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979, worldwide Revolutions of 1989, and Arab Spring in the early 2010s.

Etymology

The French noun revolucion traces back to the 13th century, and the English equivalent "revolution" to the late 14th century. The word was limited then to mean the revolving motion of celestial bodies. "Revolution" in the sense of abrupt change in a social order was first recorded in the mid-15th century. By 1688, the political meaning of the word was familiar enough that the replacement of James II with William III was termed the "Glorious Revolution".

Definition

"Revolution" is now employed most often to denote a change in social and political institutions. Jeff Goodwin offers two definitions. First, a broad one, including "any and all instances in which a state or a political regime is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular, extraconstitutional or violent fashion". Second, a narrow one, in which "revolutions entail not only mass mobilization and regime change, but also more or less rapid and fundamental social, economic or cultural change, during or soon after the struggle for state power".

Jack Goldstone defines a revolution thusly:

<blockquote>"[Revolution is] an effort to transform the political institutions and the justifications for political authority in society, accompanied by formal or informal mass mobilization and noninstitutionalized actions that undermine authorities. This definition is broad enough to encompass events ranging from the relatively peaceful revolutions that toppled communist regimes to the violent Islamic revolution in Afghanistan. At the same time, this definition is strong enough to exclude coups, revolts, civil wars, and rebellions that make no effort to transform institutions or the justification for authority." They also questioned whether a revolution is purely political (i.e., concerned with the restructuring of government) or whether "it is an extensive and inclusive social change affecting all the various aspects of the life of a society, including the economic, religious, industrial, and familial as well as the political".

Types

There are numerous typologies of revolution in the social science literature. Alexis de Tocqueville differentiated between:

sudden and violent revolutions that seek not only to establish a new political system but to overhaul an entire society, and;
slow and relentless revolutions that involve sweeping transformations of the entire society and may take several generations to bring about (such as changes in religion).

thumb|The [[Revolutions of 1848 were essentially bourgeois revolutions and democratic and liberal in nature, with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures and creating independent nation-states.]]

One of the Marxist typologies divides revolutions into:

pre-capitalist
early bourgeois
bourgeois
bourgeois-democratic
early proletarian
socialist

Charles Tilly, a modern scholar of revolutions, differentiated between:

coup d'état (a top-down seizure of power), e.g., Poland, 1926
civil war
revolt, and
"great revolution" (a revolution that transforms economic and social structures as well as political institutions, such as the French Revolution of 1789, Russian Revolution of 1917, or Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979).

Mark Katz identified six forms of revolution:

rural revolution
urban revolution
coup d'état, e.g., Egypt, 1952
revolution from above, e.g., Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward of 1958
revolution from without, e.g., the Allied invasions of Italy in 1943 and of Germany in 1945
revolution by osmosis, e.g., the gradual Islamization of several countries.

thumb|A [[Watt steam engine in Madrid. The development of the steam engine propelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the world. The steam engine was created to pump water from coal mines, enabling them to be deepened beyond groundwater levels.|alt=]]

These categories are not mutually exclusive; the Russian Revolution of 1917 began with an urban revolution to depose the Czar, followed by a rural revolution, followed by the Bolshevik coup in November. Katz also cross-classified revolutions as follows:

Central: countries, usually Great Powers, which play a leading role in a revolutionary wave; e.g., the USSR, Nazi Germany, Iran since 1979
Aspiring revolutions, which follow the Central revolution
subordinate or puppet revolutions
rival revolutions, in which a former alliance is broken, such as Yugoslavia after 1948, and China after 1960.

A further dimension to Katz's typology is that revolutions are either against (anti-monarchy, anti-dictatorial, anti-communist, anti-democratic) or for (pro-fascism, pro-communism, pro-nationalism, etc.). In the latter cases, a transition period is generally necessary to decide which direction to take to achieve the desired form of government. Other types of revolution, created for other typologies, include proletarian or communist revolutions (inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aim to replace capitalism with communism); failed or abortive revolutions (that are not able to secure power after winning temporary victories or amassing large-scale mobilizations); or violent vs. nonviolent revolutions. The term revolution has also been used to denote great changes outside the political sphere. Such revolutions, often labeled social revolutions, are recognized as major transformations in a society's culture, philosophy, or technology, rather than in its political system. Some social revolutions are global in scope, while others are limited to single countries. Commonly cited examples of social revolution are the Industrial Revolution, Scientific Revolution, Commercial Revolution, and Digital Revolution. These revolutions also fit the "slow revolution" type identified by Tocqueville.

Studies of revolution

thumb|R E V O L U T I O N, [[graffiti with political message on a house wall in Ystad, Sweden. Four letters have been written backwards and in a different color so that they also form the word Love.]]

left|thumb|The [[storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789 during the French Revolution.]]

thumb|upright|right|[[George Washington, leader of the American Revolution.]]

thumb|upright|right|[[Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.]]

thumb|upright|right|[[Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Chinese Xinhai Revolution in 1911.]]

thumb|[[Khana Ratsadon, a group of military officers and civil officials, who staged the Siamese Revolution of 1932]]

Political and socioeconomic revolutions have been studied in many social sciences, particularly sociology, political science and history. Scholars of revolution differentiate four generations of theoretical research on the subject of revolution. Theorists of the first generation, including Gustave Le Bon, Charles A. Ellwood, and Pitirim Sorokin, were mainly descriptive in their approach, and their explanations of the phenomena of revolutions were usually related to social psychology, such as Le Bon's crowd psychology theory. He outlined what he called their "uniformities", although the American Revolution deviated somewhat from the pattern. As a result, most later comparative studies of revolution substituted China (1949) in their lists, but they continued Brinton's practice of focusing on four. The initial fourth-generation books and journal articles generally relied on the Polity data series on democratization. Such analyses, like those by A. J. Enterline, Zeev Maoz, and Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, identified a revolution by a significant change in the country's score on Polity's autocracy-to-democracy scale.

Since the 2010s, scholars like Jeff Colgan have argued that the Polity data series—which evaluates the degree of democratic or autocratic authority in a state's governing institutions based on the openness of executive recruitment, constraints on executive authority, and political competition—is inadequate because it measures democratization, not revolution, and doesn't account for regimes which come to power by revolution but fail to change the structure of the state and society sufficiently to yield a notable difference in the Polity score. Instead, Colgan offered a new data set to single out governments that "transform the existing social, political, and economic relationships of the state by overthrowing or rejecting the principal existing institutions of society." This data set has been employed to make empirically based contributions to the literature on revolution by finding links between revolution and the likelihood of international disputes.

Revolutions have been further examined from an anthropological perspective. Drawing on Victor Turner's writings on ritual and performance, Bjorn Thomassen suggested that revolutions can be understood as "liminal" moments: modern political revolutions very much resemble rituals and can therefore be studied within a process approach. This would imply not only a focus on political behavior "from below", but also a recognition of moments where "high and low" are relativized, subverted, or made irrelevant, and where the micro and macro levels fuse together in critical conjunctions. Economist Douglass North raised a note of caution about revolutionary change, how it "is never as revolutionary as its rhetoric would have us believe". While the "formal rules" of laws and constitutions can be changed virtually overnight, the "informal constraints" such as institutional inertia and cultural inheritance do not change quickly and thereby slow down the societal transformation. According to North, the tension between formal rules and informal constraints is "typically resolved by some restructuring of the overall constraints—in both directions—to produce a new equilibrium that is far less revolutionary than the rhetoric." According to academics Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, regimes that came to power during revolutions such as China, Cuba, Iran and Vietnam tend to be among the most durable and long-lasting. Their studies showed that autocracies that emerged out of revolutions lasted, on average, as long as three times as nonrevolutionary regimes and collapsed at a one-fifth at the rate of nonrevolutionary systems. Additionally, revolutionary regimes tend to face contestation such as coups and large-scale protests at a smaller rate, and have more tools to thwart them when such threats emerge. Revolutionary regimes have cohesive elite structures that minimize the chances of defections and tend to stay loyal during times of turmoil. They have strong coercive institutions, including loyal militaries that protect the ruling regime's status. Regimes that emerged out of social revolutions also tend to lack independent centers of power that allow for opposition.

References

Bibliography

External links

Arendt, Hannah (1963). IEP.UTM.edu. On Revolution. Penguin Classics. New Ed edition: February 8, 1991. .